Newsletter

Couple to be prosecuted in Athens for child torture

Damita Peak

Norris Walker

A woman and her common-law husband who were convicted in Oconee County two years ago for torturing the woman’s 12-year-old son will now be prosecuted for crimes against the child in Clarke County Superior Court.

Damita Devonna Peak and Norris Lazarus Walker abused the child when they moved to Athens in early 2008, but they weren’t arrested until December that year after they relocated to Oconee County.

Peak and Walker were tried in that county first, and in May 2010 a jury convicted them on charges they locked Peak’s son naked in a closet, shot him with a pellet gun, pepper-sprayed him and deprived him of food.

Superior Court Judge Steve Jones, who sentenced both defendants to 40 years in prison without the possibility of parole, said the child abuse case “disgusted” him.

Peak’s son might have ended up dead, Jones said during sentencing, if officials at Rocky Branch Elementary School in Oconee County hadn’t noticed signs of abuse and called on child-protective services to remove the victim and his younger brother from the home.

After Peak and Walker were arrested in Oconee County, a grand jury in Athens-Clarke County returned an indictment that accused the couple of multiple counts of aggravated assault, false imprisonment and first-degree child cruelty.

The Western Judicial Circuit district attorney recently asked for an arraignment date to begin prosecuting the local criminal case. Last week, Superior Court Judge H. Patrick Haggard scheduled arraignments for Oct. 2.

During the Oconee County trial, Peak testified that she began punishing her son when he was 9 or 10, when they lived in Miami, by beating him or making him stay in his room.

Peak, 38, and Walker, 41, told jurors they punished the boy because he constantly got in trouble and didn’t respond to traditional forms of punishment. They used extreme measures because they didn’t want him to die from drugs or end up in prison like other relatives had in Florida, they testified.

Neither expressed remorse for what they did to Peak’s son, now 15 and living in the area with an adoptive family.

Peak and Walker moved with her children to Georgia in 2006, ending up in Athens two years later when Peak landed a job as a jailer in Walton County, where she was issued handcuffs and pepper spray.

While living at an extended-stay motel off South Milledge Avenue, Peak and Walker made the boy stand for hours in the corner with his arms held out, and Walker shot him with a pellet gun when he lowered his arms. They also tied his hands, or handcuffed them, to a clothes bar in the closet so he wouldn’t drop his arms.

The family moved at the end of November 2008 to the Wellington Park duplex complex in Bogart, where the victim slept on a closet’s bare floor with just a Batman blanket each night until his parents were arrested.

Peak and Walker fed him only water and bread, sometimes with peanut butter, while locked up.

In the Bogart home, the young victim urinated in the closet because no one answered his pleas to be let out, and Peak punished the child by pepper-spraying him in the face.

The Oconee County jury convicted Peak and Walker each on 10 counts of false imprisonment, eight counts of second-degree child cruelty, and two counts of battery.

Jurors found Peak guilty of three counts of first-degree child cruelty and convicted Walker on two counts.